It is good fun, looks great and is of suitably stern challenge. The Monk can use a spell to sweep enemies toward him, before using his lightning quick 7-hit attack. The Wizard, for instance, can bring down a fiery meteor before blasting a wind attack through to spread the inferno. ‘That’ being the explicit combination of some of the character’s skills, a first for Diablo. It opens up your mind to saying if we can do this, you can do that.” “It’s definitely an iterative process and is something we will continue to iterate on,” Elggren says of the control system “But it allowed us to do new mechanics. When I ask production director Dan Elggren what tricks Blizzard and NetEase got up to to make Diablo Immortal work as well as it does, he was fairly coy. There will be six classes at launch, with the potential of more to come in updates over time. Movement is slick and measured, while the new powers tested over three classes -Wizard, Barbarian and Monk- are matched to the particular characteristics of a touch screen. By their very nature, virtual buttons are subject to slippage and occasional imprecision, but this is one of the best implementations of the mechanic I’ve played. Is it as precise and tactile as a physical control system? No, of course not.

A virtual thumbstick appears wherever you place your digit on the left side of the screen, while up to five powers cluster around a big attack button on the right. Which are, to all intents and purposes, Diablo clones themselves. Immortal is being co-developed by Chinese games giant NetEase and, has been gleefully pointed out, shares similarities with certain of the developer’s previous games.

But true to Blizzard’s word, this isn’t a conversion but a bespoke game for touchscreens. Fundamentally this is Diablo, it has the same detailed gothic look, fast-paced demon-slaying and ferocious abilities you will have seen in the most recent Diablo 3.

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